


Cross Your Heart

by inamorata_jones



Series: Confessional [3]
Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 15:10:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18471499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inamorata_jones/pseuds/inamorata_jones
Summary: Post-6x16. Liz and Red have a talk.





	Cross Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Because I'm increasingly irritated with the decidedly adolescent cast the writers have given a lot of Red and Liz's responses to things this season, we're doing a confession scene again. This version's mild Lizzington, which is not usually my thing.

“He’s killing people, Elizabeth,” Dembe says. “Anyone he thinks might have profited from his arrest. Testing to see whether an associate who knows who put him in prison will come forward and stop the bloodshed.”

She sags against the side of the staircase, feeling the metal railing bite into her back. “How many?” she asks weakly. “Do I know them?”

Dembe tells her, quickly and quietly, about Putnum. Her stomach heaves, and she has to press a hand over her mouth to keep from vomiting on the spot. She can imagine it with perfect clarity: the man’s terror, his drop, the wet crack of dozens of his bones breaking simultaneously on impact. The blood. He’d been weaselly as hell, but she’d gotten to like the little carnie.

“He’s back to the way he was after Kate,” the bodyguard goes on. “The violence is a reflex. There’s no reason in him. And this time—”

“This time you can’t use me to try and pull him out of it. Jesus, Dembe. This is why I was afraid. Part of me wants to run, but there’d be no point, would there? He’d just track me down.” She shuts her eyes, tries to think. “Okay. Okay. I’ll handle it. Give me a few hours, and then bring him to the new place. Don’t come in with him. I don’t think he’d hurt you of all people, but—”

“You shouldn’t face this alone.”

“I put him in prison alone. You had nothing to do with that. I had my reasons, but this is on me.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Thank you. For all the times you’ve been kind. And keep—keep looking after him, okay? He’s going to need it.”

She ends the call before he can say anything more, stepping back out into the main room of the Post Office.

“Hey,” she calls out to Ressler in passing. “I’m gonna head home; not feeling well. Mind telling Cooper when you see him?”

Her partner eyes her sharply. “Need a hand, Keen? Someone to drive you?”

“Nah, I’ll be all right. Just a bit of food poisoning or something. Might’ve been those beef nachos I had with Aram at the bar last night.” It’s convincing enough, she suspects. She’s gone cold and shaky and probably quite pale.

“Okay. Feel better.”

She tries a small smile. “Thanks.”

Agnes, at least, is safe with Scottie, and as to the rest, Aram has all the necessary papers. She’d made him her executor when she’d come back from Alaska, not having been able to ask Cooper, and not having anyone else she trusted. Poor guy. First Samar, now her; it’s going to be a struggle for him.

_Get your purse, Liz. Get to the car. Get to the apartment. Don’t think past that._

 

*

 

It’s late in the day by the time he comes in. She’s left the lights off and closed the blinds partway, so that when he first sees her face it will be softened and made lovely by the fading sun. She looks more like her mother that way, she knows; maybe the resemblance will soften him too, convince him to make it quick.

The catch in his breath when he notices her there in his armchair tells her that part’s worked.

 “Elizabeth,” he says softly. He’s looking at her intently, his lips slightly parted, in the way he does when he’s feeling things neither of them wants to admit. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

 She tries to keep her voice just as low, if not as tender. “You have to stop killing people, Red. The ones who work for you.”

 “I have to know—”

  “You already know.”

The first time she’d betrayed him, setting a trap for him after he’d killed Sam, his face had been suffused with love as he’d watched her. She remembers the  sweetness of it, the infinite patience in his voice as he’d asked what had made her change her mind. The second time, after Kirk, there’d been incomprehension, relief, the dark edge of a deep hurt. This time, there’s an instant of absolute rage, then blankness.

He removes his hat deliberately and sets it on the hall table. “Let me get you a drink,” he says, in the  tone he uses for people who don’t matter to him at all, and moves into the kitchen.

 If she’d had to pick a bolt-hole of his to die in, she thinks, it wouldn’t have been this one, with its dark wood and white counters. She’d have opted for the Bethesda apartment. Something about it—all the bookcases, the worn desk, the bright rugs—makes her feel comfortable, at peace. It’s just as well, though, she thinks a little wildly. If he’d killed her there, the gunshot might have scared the cat.

In another moment, he emerges, a glass of Scotch in one hand and her cocktail in the other. She recognizes the drink’s deep purplish gleam.

 “Oh, Red.”

Their fingers brush as he hands it to her. She closes her eyes, breathing in his cologne and the clean masculine scent of him underneath it, the one she might associate with the word _beloved_ if she hadn’t had to spend so much time trying to associate it with the word _father_.

To soon, he recedes, settling in the chair across from her and regarding her steadily. “As I recall, you didn’t get to finish the first one. Take your time with that one, if you like.”

When he makes it, she discovers, the aviation cocktail does indeed taste like spring. It’s delicious, but she can only manage three sips before she has to put it down. She rubs absently at her scar.

“If you wanted me dead, Elizabeth,” he begins conversationally, “there were easier ways to manage it.”

“I didn’t.”

“There was a time you wouldn’t have been too squeamish to handle it yourself. Remember that little trick with the pen? You could’ve just tried it again. There would have been _so much less_ collateral damage.”

“I didn’t want you dead. Or beaten, or tortured, or broken-hearted, or anything you’ve been because of me. Even when I hated you, I didn’t. Why do you think I testified for you?”

 “Because you wanted to quiet your conscience.”

 “Wrong.”

He raises his eyebrows in a show of polite inquiry. “Then what, if I might ask, _did_ you want?”

“To know, same as you do. Who you were. Why you took my father’s identity. What kind of fucked-up thing you’d had going with my mother and why it made me important to you. I couldn’t find out without . . . containing you for a while. That’s all I ever meant to do. You have all these stupid secrets, up to and including whatever disease you’re probably stoically dying of—and don’t tell me it’s nothing; I’ve seen the weird little vials of shit you have in the fridge. We’ve worked together for seven years and I don’t even know your goddamned name. You want to talk about collateral damage? You’ve made _this relationship_ collateral damage.”

“Stop ranting, Agent Keen.”

“Fuck you.”

He sighs, takes a swallow of his scotch. “Nicholas.”

“What?”

“It’s Nicholas. Was.”

She stares. “As in Nick’s Pizza?”

“Yes. And please don’t presume to call what we have a relationship. It’s a transactional arrangement. One you’re evidently tired of.”

 “Oh, don’t pull that with me. You love me. I love you. I told you.”

“And a pretty performance it was, too. I might have died believing it.”

“Believe it or don’t. If the fact that I'm here trying to settle things with you doesn't convince you, I don't know what will.”

There’s a long moment of silence. Liz leans the back of her head against chair, and closes her eyes. “If you weren’t about to kill me,” she mumbles, “I’d be embarrassed I just admitted that again.”

When he speaks, he sounds just as exhausted as she is. “I don’t like liars, Agent Keen.”

“I’m not one. Well,” she amends, “not as far as that’s concerned.”

“And I can’t abide traitors.”

“I know, I know. You kill them. Even the ones who love you, like Mr. Kaplan. So get on with it. Just make it clean, please. I’d rather not suffer.” A thought occurs to her. “Oh, and Nicholas?”

 She can practically hear the muscle under his eye twitch.

 “Yes?”

“Look after Agnes? I still have you listed in my will as her guardian. Well, not you. Bill Kershaw. Whatever name you were using most often at the time. Aram knows. He’ll handle that paperwork, but there are other things he might need help with.”

 He makes a terrible choked noise low in his throat. She sits up, looking at him in alarm. His eyes are wide and wet, but there’s no weapon in his hand.

“The thing—” He stops, clears his throat harshly, and tries again. “The thing is that even after what you’ve done to me, I’d much rather turn a gun on myself than on you.”

“Please don’t do that. Dembe loves you, Agnes will need you, there are people who—”

His face contorts. He drains the last of his Scotch in a swallow, then heaves the glass at the window behind her head. It catches the edge of the frame and shatters, fragments scattering over the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a minute. “I shouldn’t have.”

She gets up slowly and crosses the room to stand in front of him. Waits until he looks up. “I’m sorry. _I_ shouldn’t have. Do you think,” she asks, bending to cup his cheek and counting it as a victory when he doesn’t flinch away, “we could forgive each other, if we tried? Kept talking things out?”

“It’s possible. Difficult, but possible. We’d have to change a lot of habits.”

“I think it’s probably time for that, don’t you? Time for something new to begin?”

He turns his head to press a chaste kiss to her palm. “That does sound appealing, sweetheart. But first—”

“You want to hear me admit it yet again?”

“I do! I’m so unused to you admitting things.”

She laughs. “Asshole” she tells him. “Love you.”

Another kiss, this one less chaste. “Good,” he murmurs. “Good.”

 

           

           

           

 

 

 


End file.
